Well, Hillary has won the N.H. Primary. And she's well positioned for Super Tuesday. I expected Obama to win. You'd think I'd have learned to distrust polls by now. I'm far from being an Obama partisan, none of the candidates has earned my allegiance to this point. I'm much more interested in local races this time around.

But here's my concern - I think this result hints at a darker possibility, one that has been the elephant in the ballroom for Obama since the beginning.

Quoting from Salon.com:

"The exit polls showed Clinton winning with voters whose household income was under $50,000, while Obama carried most upscale and younger voters. (Edwards did not get more than 20 percent support from any demographic group.) In similar fashion, Clinton whomped Obama by a 48-to-30 margin with voters who did not attend college."

...in other words, those most likely to have a problem with Obama's ethnicity. I'm wondering if we saw the charge of the closeted ballot box racists, here - people who would not admit to pollsters that they were biased against Obama due to his race, but expressed their inner Archie Bunker in the privacy of the voting booth. Remember that you don't have to be a registered Democrat in N.H. to vote in the Democratic primary. In Iowa, due to the caucusing system a voter was forced to publicly declare, and was likely to be subject to persuasion and to being asked the reasons for his allegiance to a particular candidate in front of his neighbors.

Hillary also won a huge margin among women - 46 to 34 percent - which no doubt was critical to her success. But why, aside from being a woman, would women voters flock to her? She's not especially progressive among Democratic presidential candidates on what are gratingly called "women's issues," (abortion, workplace opportunity, maternity leave, etc.) She dropped the ball in a big, bad way on healthcare reform, She was, and continues to be (when it counts) a fellow-traveler with the Neo-Cons on foriegn policy. Please, don't let it be her Muskie moment last week. Please don't let it be that obviously phony, stage-managed, lachrimose bit of tin-pan mummery. Please tell me that Granite state women, and older voters are not so easily gulled. Please, say it ain't so.

I can't explain this result any better than the people who try to do it for a living, so I won't be dogmatic. I don't know why this happened. In the interest of full disclosure I do think that the republic can't take another four years of Neo-Con idiocy and greed. And I don't think that Hillary Clinton can win the general election against McCain, Romney, or Huckabee. Too much baggage, too offputting, too vulnerable on too many votes in the Senate, too easily slimed, so I don't want to see her as the nominee. The problem is that if my fears re:closet racists have even a 5% validity nationwide, Obama can't win either.

It's a three-pipe problem, that's for sure. I'd like to be wrong about this. Perhaps someone who feels more strongly (positively!) about Hillary's issues, or her organization has a more palatable explanation for the difference between the polling data and the outcome.

...you wouldn't say, "This is based on real events, but it is a work of fiction. The facts and timeline are at the service of the narrative."

Would moot all the kerfuffle, eh?

In fact, that's not a bad rule of thumb for politics, philosophy, journalism, and literature among others:

(please ignore the Oxford comma. Can't be helped.)

"Moot the Kerfuffle."

My life is almost entirely fictional. So is yours. Your memories are unrelieable, other people's recollections are self-serving (so are yours, so are mine.) Do we really need to be reminded of this so frequently?

Unless you have the laughably sophomoric idea that biographies are especially veracious bits of lit, then this really ain't news, is it?

...but still, I've never seen a memoir stand up unscathed to fact checking by a source independent of the writer or the publisher. Especially if the person writing the work has any sort of public image or bio to protect/burnish.

I think it's time to admit that we're all figments of our imaginations. 'Twould cut down on the righteous indignation.

I don't think I believe in "Non-Fiction." I'm not sure its even possible.

Would we be better off if we just assumed that anything we read was fictive? I suspect we would. Especially on the Intertubes.

I'd prefer to see cooperative, creative responses to realistic challenges, rather than petty, high-school backbiting and a pseudo-darwininan game framework. I never bothered (after a two-episode experiment) to watch "Survivor;" I couldn't care less what happened to those minor-league Machiavellian twerps. This sounds more interesting.

I've always felt that shows like "Survivor" its ilk reinforce the sort of selfish, deceptive behavior that makes living in the modern world such a dispiritng grind. Criticizing this show because it has a message embedded is foolish - EVERY television show has a message in it - its just that this one isn't "COMPETE, CONSUME, CONFORM!"